Philosophy and Natural Science

From philosophy to science (to natural philosophy): evolutionary developmental perspectives.

This paper focuses on abstraction as a mode of reasoning that facilitates a productive relationship between philosophy and science. Using examples from evolutionary developmental biology, I argue that there are two areas where abstraction can be relevant to science: reasoning explication and problem clarification. The value of abstraction is characterized in terms of methodology (modeling or da...

Why natural science needs phenomenological philosophy.

Through an exploration of theoretical physics, this paper suggests the need for regrounding natural science in phenomenological philosophy. To begin, the philosophical roots of the prevailing scientific paradigm are traced to the thinking of Plato, Descartes, and Newton. The crisis in modern science is then investigated, tracking developments in physics, science's premier discipline. Einsteinia...

David Hull’s Natural Philosophy of Science

Before science: the invention of the friars' natural philosophy

impact on Ibn Tufayl's forerunners, especially Avicenna, whom Ibn Tufayl quotes expressly. Salim Kemal's 'Justifications of poetic validity' gives a very condensed summary of his monograph The poetics ofAlfarabi and Avicenna (Leiden, 1991). But I doubt whether Ibn Tufayl's novel kind of thought experiment can be grasped in terms of Avicenna's poetology. The medieval Latin translators did not co...

Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Chemistry

In this paper I assess the relation between philosophy of chemistry and (general) philosophy of science, focusing on those themes in the philosophy of chemistry that may bring about major revisions or extensions of current philosophy of science. Three themes can claim to make a unique contribution to philosophy of science: first, the variety of materials in the (natural and artificial) world; s...